Windows 7 comes with its concept of libraries, which makes it easier to find, access, work with and organize files scattered across your computer or even over the network regardless of where they are stored. From our experience, it’s a huge productivity boost and you get more work done generally.

In some ways, a library is similar to a folder in concept. It aggregates files from different locations and displays them as a single collection. However, unlike a folder, a library gathers files that are stored in several locations without actually storing your items or moving your files from the original folder. This is a subtle, but important, difference. Libraries monitor folders that contain your items, and let you access and arrange the items in different ways like 'documents by type', 'pictures by date taken' and 'music by genre'. Say you have three video folders (Movies, TV shows and You-tube rips). Or you are assembling your music collection with some songs stored on an external hard-drive, some stored on your friend's laptop connected over a network and some in your work computer. With Windows Vista or XP, hunting down specific songs would have been a tedious chore. But with libraries, you can merge them into one by telling Windows which far-flung folders should be included in your new library and have instant access to all your files at once even though they are still physically stored in different locations. Public Folders also merge into libraries so your whole network can have seamless access to your public files. This feature is particularly useful if you have a home media server because you can now access the media on the server without navigating to mapped drives.